The CIA won't admit if the WikiLeaks 'Vault 7' dump is authentic, but wants you to be upset anyway

The facts may or may not be legit, but either way, you should be upset with WikiLeaks for giving them to you.

That's the message coming out of the CIA following yesterday's massive "Vault 7" intelligence dump by the whistleblowing site. The agency, through a spokesperson, made it clear that having one's cake and eating it too is a long-since mastered CIA skill.

“We have no comment on the authenticity of purported intelligence documents released by Wikileaks or on the status of any investigation into the source of the documents," a CIA spokesperson told Mashable. "However, there are several critical points we would like to make."

One of those critical points includes the following: "The American public should be deeply troubled by any Wikileaks disclosure designed to damage the Intelligence Community’s ability to protect America against terrorists and other adversaries," explained the spokesperson. "Such disclosures not only jeopardize US personnel and operations, but also equip our adversaries with tools and information to do us harm.”

Got that? If the Wikileaks documents are real — and the agency is definitely not saying they are — Americans should be "deeply troubled."

To that point, the spokesperson assured us that it "is also important to note that CIA is legally prohibited from conducting electronic surveillance targeting individuals here at home, including our fellow Americans, and CIA does not do so."

This would be mostly reassuring, were it not for WikiLeaks' claim that the CIA recently "lost control of the majority of its hacking arsenal including malware, viruses, trojans, weaponized 'zero day' exploits, malware remote control systems and associated documentation."

In other words, many people other than U.S. intelligence officials may now have access to the hacking tools. Deeply troubling indeed.

But don't worry too much! The documents may not be authentic, remember? (Although Edward Snowden thinks they probably are.) Either way, you should be upset with WikiLeaks for telling you about them.

Mashable
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